As part of the FOSS project, Chris Bailey and Susie Halksworth (normally based at CIAC) have been working with organisations to develop web pages for them.

The web pages are created using Joomla, a free, open source programme which produces high-quality interactive web pages. Joomla is based on modules, and allows the user to install whatever modules they wish on their site: for example, users may choose to have forums, have password-protected areas of the site, have user polls or events guides, or many more.

Joomla offers a new way of thinking about the possibilities of low-cost web pages: the level of interactivity it offers is something that previously has only been obtainable at a large cost, something that has so far been out of the reach of small voluntary organisations.

Response from the organisations Chris and Susie have been working with (organisations which vary from very small, with turnovers of less than £5,000 per year, to those with a regional perspective) has been overwhelmingly positive. It has been very exciting to see them begin to think about the benefits of a web page which isn’t just static content: many of the organisations have only been able to update their existing web pages through one person via various tortured processes, and the idea that they can control the upkeep and updating of their own web space has been extremely empowering for people.

The project is hoping to help organisations move away from the idea of a web page as an essentially static, and in practice unchanging for long periods, piece of advertisement, to something which, by engaging service users, can be put right at the heart of the organisation’s aims and functioning. To this end, the intention is that people be empowered to use, change, adapt and develop the web space we set them up with initially: so, after the initial setting up of the web pages, Chris and Susie will be putting energy into empowering people to engage in their upkeep, through training and support.

A useful feature of Joomla is that it allows anyone with an appropriate password to edit a given website, (and their level of permission can be set to restrict people to updating certain sections).The editing is no more complicated than editing a word processing document: we are confident that we will have all the organisations, whatever their initial level of computer literacy, changing and adding to their own websites in no time at all. It’s a world away from the bad old days of one person in an organisation having access to the web files, which had to be changed (perhaps in Dreamweaver or, horror of horrors! html) and then uploaded, laboriously: not to mention what happened if that person then left…

With its emphasis on empowering organisations to take charge of their own web sites, and giving them technology which in its non-open-source version is unaffordable to most voluntary organisations, the Joomla work very much epitomises what we are trying to do with the FOSS project as a whole, and we are very excited with the way it’s developing. Watch this space…